George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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This is the true joy in life: Being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
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The person I miss most is the one I could have been.
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Our prejudices are so deeply rooted that we never think of them as prejudices but call them common sense.
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That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.
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It is the first duty of every man not to be poor.
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Never repeat old grievances.
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A vegetarian is not a person who lives on vegetables, any more than a Catholic is a person who lives on cats.
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In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.
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Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.
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We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment.
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Paradoxes are the only truths.
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There is the eternal war between those who are in the world for what they can get out of it and those who are in the world to make it a better place for everybody to live in.
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Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.
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God made the world as an artist and that is why the world must learn from its artists.
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The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy.
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Religion is a good invention in times of stress.
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The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
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You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys, and my day's wage. You are my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my rapscallionly fellow vagabond, my tempter and star. I want you.
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Christianity as a specific doctrine was slain with Jesus, suddenly and utterly. He was hardly cold in his grave, or high in his heaven (as you please), before the apostles dragged the tradition of him down to the level of the thing it has remained ever since.
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Rich men without convictions are more dangerous in modern society than poor women without chastity.
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We must reform society before we can reform ourselves.
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I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.
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That proves it's not by Shaw, because all Shaw's characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw.
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People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.